Advancements in computer and networking technologies have resulted in the creation of computer and information networks such as the Internet which interconnect many thousands of computer systems together to allow such computer systems to share information. Such computer systems can share information in the form of documents, files, streams of data or in other forms using a variety of communications protocols. One widely used suite of communications protocols provides a networked information or document sharing application which is generally referred to as the World Wide Web, or simply the “web.” To access information on the web, a computer user typically operates a software application called a web browser on his or her computer system. In operation, a conventional web browser provides a graphical user interface that a user can operate to access information provided by web server software applications which operate on web server computer systems coupled to the computer network. The information that a user can access over the web can be in the form of web pages, documents, graphical images, files, or other types of data or information.
By way of example, a user can provide the identity of a particular document to a web browser in the form of a uniform resource locator or URL. A uniform resource locator contains information that a web browser requires to access a document or other information. A typical uniform resource locator may specify a communications protocol (e.g., the hypertext transport protocol or http) that a web browser is to use to retrieve a document identified within the URL and may also specify the name of the web server that can access, provide or “serve” that particular document to the web browser over a network. In response to receiving a URL containing this information, the web browser can use the designated communications protocol to access the specified web server to request and retrieve the document identified by the URL. When the designated web server receives such a request, the web server can respond by obtaining and returning the contents of the document specified in the request to the requesting web browser over the computer network. In many cases, the contents of the document is formatted according to a markup language such as the hypertext markup language or HTML. The web browser that receives the document can interpret the HTML contents of the document in order to properly render or display the contents within the web browser on the graphical user interface of the user's computer system for viewing by the user. The document content may include, for example, text content, graphical content (e.g., images), audio and/or video content, or other content, data or information.
The graphical user interface provided by a conventional web browser typically includes a browser window which the web browser uses to display the contents of documents, such as explained above. In addition to the browser window, a conventional web browser includes a variety of user-operable navigation buttons or commands (e.g., contained within pull-down menus) which allow the user to instruct the web browser which documents are to be retrieved from web servers. By way of example, many conventional web browsers include “back” and “forward” buttons that a user may select to cause the web browser to backup or move forward between the contents of previously viewed documents. This is called navigating the web. Conventional graphical user interfaces provided by web browsers also typically include an address bar which displays the URL of the document currently in view within the web browser window.